Monthly Archives: August 2013

Bridges and Broadband

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broadbandplanThe federal Labor party have announced funding of $52 million (half the the cost) towards duplicating the Tourle St bridge to make the crossing 4 lanes in total.  The crazy thing is that when the new double lane bridge was being built a few years ago by the state Labor government, an extra $15 million would have gotten us a 4 lane crossing from the start. Now the cost of those two extra lanes is $104 million!

This cogently illustrates a principle of infrastructure development – doing it on the cheap is always more expensive in the long run.

So when it comes to a major infrastructure development such as national broadband, the Coalition’s plan of using Fibre To The Node (FTTN) then the existing copper network to the home, is a classic example of cheapskate infrastructure development. Yes it will be delivered faster than Labor’s Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) plan, and it will be cheaper in the short term – but, FTTN is a solution that will last 5-10 years, whereas FTTP will be good for 50-100 years.  In 10 years time when the demand for bandwidth has outstripped the capacity of the FTTN network, Tony Abbott’s cheapskate plan is going to look rather foolish.

Godwin’s Law and the Daily Telegraph

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Godwin’s Law is an ancient (by internet time) law that states that in any online discussion that goes on long enough, someone will eventually make reference to Hitler and/or the Nazis, and furthermore that the person who makes the reference is deemed to have lost the argument.

It seems that Godwin’s Law applies to non-internet space as well, and with the front page of the Daily Telegraph today, as much as I’d like to say that the Daily Telegraph has lost, in fact the real losers are the Australian public who get served up such shoddy stuff parading as journalism.

Company tax

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So Tony Abbott wants to cut the company tax rate by 1.5%. I’m not across this issue enough to know whether this is a good, bad or indifferent thing, although I note that even in the business community there are divided opinions on this.

What I do know is that with all the tax cutting Tony Abbott is promising (mining tax, carbon tax, company tax) its still completely opaque how this fits with his promise to cut government debt and balance the budget.

 

When is a number not a number?

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When you’re Virgin Australia airlines. I just spent a frustrating hour trying to do a web check in on the Virgin Australia website, trying to work out what my Reservation Number was, having booked through another travel website.NotANumberIt turns out that the reservation ‘number’ I had to enter was actually a 6 character alphabetic code (like “MFDJDX”) and not a number at all! Completely dopey.

National Living Treasures

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I was sitting in a cafe yesterday morning reading a copy of “The Essential Leunig” and was again mightily impressed by Leunig’s insight and clarity and humour in perceiving and expressing our human condition.  For some reason it got me thinking about the list of Australian National Living Treasures –  a pretty dopey concept, but if it has any sanity at all it would have to have Leunig on the list. I checked. He is.

Yesterday afternoon Kevin Rudd announced that the federal election will be held on September 7. That got me thinking of Antony Green – surely he’s on the list of National Living Treasures? I checked. He’s not.

Forget the federal election campaign – there ought to be a campaign to remove Clive Palmer from the list and substitute Antony Green!